BACKGROUND "The enigma of soil animal species diversity" was the title of a popular article by J. M. Anderson published in 1975. In that paper, Anderson provided insights on the great richness of species found in soils, but emphasized that the mechanisms contributing to the high species richness belowground were largely unknown. Yet, exploration of the mechanisms driving species richness has fo...

Studying the distributions of plants and animals along environmental gradients can illuminate the factors governing and maintaining species diversity. There are two general predictions of how species richness and elevation are related: either species richness decreases monotonically with increasing elevation or richness peaks at mid-elevations. Several processes might contribute to this pattern...

Aim To consider the role of local colonization and extinction rates in explaining the generation and maintenance of species richness gradients at the regional scale. Location A Mediterranean biome (oak forests, deciduous forests, shrublands, pinewoods, firwoods, alpine heathlands, crops) in Catalonia, Spain. Methods We analysed the relative importance of direct and indirect effects of community...

The abiotic and biotic gradients on mountains have enormous potential to improve our understanding of species distributions, species richness patterns and conservation. Here we describe how abiotic factors change with elevation, how flora and fauna respond to these changes and how elevational species richness patterns have been studied to uncover drivers of biodiversity. There are four main tre...

Bird species richness is mediated by local, regional, and historical factors, for example, competition, environmental heterogeneity, contemporary, and historical climate. Here, we related bird species richness with phylogenetic relatedness of bird assemblages, plant species richness, topography, contemporary climate, and glacial-interglacial climate change to investigate the relative importance...

Soil characteristics, disturbance histories, and species richness among distinct groups of plants and animals may be useful predictors of important conservation areas when data are limited. We used multivariate analysis of covariance to test the hypothesis that the species richness of plants, arthropods, herpetofauna, and breeding birds are correlated and increase with soil fertility (silt and ...

Although tropical environments are often considered biodiversity hotspots, it is precisely in such environments where least is known about the factors that drive species richness. Here, we use phylogenetic comparative analyses to study correlates of species richness for the largest Neotropical amphibian radiation: New World direct-developing frogs. Clade-age and species richness were nonsignifi...

Changes in producer diversity cause multiple changes in consumer communities through various mechanisms. However, past analyses investigating the relationship between plant diversity and arthropod consumers focused only on few aspects of arthropod diversity, e.g. species richness and abundance. Yet, shifts in understudied facets of arthropod diversity like relative abundances or species dominan...

We compare different null models for species richness patterns in the Nepalese Himalayas, the largest altitudinal gradient in the world. Species richness is estimated by interpolation of presences between the extreme recorded altitudinal ranges. The number of species in 100-m altitudinal bands increases steeply with altitude until 1,500 m above sea level. Between 1,500 and 2,500 m, little chang...